Optical response of jammed rectangular nanostructures

Abstract

Random jammed dipole scatterers are natural composite and common byproducts of various chemical synthesis techniques. They often form complex aggregates with nontrivial correlations that influence the effective dielectric description of the medium. In this work, we investigate the packing dynamic of rectangular nanostructure under a close packing protocol and study its influence on the optical response of the medium. We show that the maximum packing densities, maximum scattering densities, and percolation threshold densities are all interconnected concepts that can be understood through the lens of Onsager's exclusion area principle. The emerging positional and orientational correlations between the rectangular dipoles are studied, and various geometrical connections are drawn. The effective dielectric constants of the generated ensembles are then computed through the strong contrast expansion method, leading to several unintuitive results such as scattering suppression at maximum packing densities, as well as densities below the percolation threshold, and maximum scattering in between.